She tapped the powder onto the glass of the mirror, crushing any pebbled bits with the edge of her drivers license and cutting the resulting pile into four short lines. “Got a bill?” she said.
He pulled one from his pocket, crumpled like the others.
“That won’t work.” She produced a crisp twenty of her own, rolled it into a thin straw and sucked one line into each of her nostrils before offering him the mirror. He shook his head.
“You don’t want?” The surprise in her eyes fell away swiftly. “Why’d you come in here,” she asked with a coy grin, “if you don’t want?”
Marty flushed at her own forwardness, cocked her head back and snorted. She squeezed shut her eyes as the drug sped from synapse to synapse. She shivered. “You’re gonna be nice to me, aren’t you?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but lowered her head to sniff the remaining lines. Before she could, he shot out an arm and took her by the throat with his hand. Her pocket mirror bounced on the linoleum. White powder dusted her boots. He began to squeeze. She jammed her knee into his scrotum and when he doubled over, she caught him beneath the chin with an uppercut that sent him sprawling onto the toilet behind him.
“Fucking freak!” she yelled, then grabbed her purse, spat in his face, and slammed the door behind her.
The stranger stood, straightened his jacket and his pants and splashed his face with water from the sink. It was brown, and the sink was clogged with cigarette butts, what looked to be a tampon. From behind the door, he could hear the woman yelling. “That fucking fucker tried to fucking kill me,” she shrieked. A second or two later, the door swung open and a white light shattered between his temples. When he came to, the barkeep was carrying him out, gripping him by the back of the neck. His feet dragged behind him like a doll’s. The barkeep opened the door and tossed him into the parking lot.
He lifted himself onto his elbows. His eyes shone with rage. “Damn you,” he hissed. “Damn you to hell.”
Standing in the doorway, the bartender laughed. “Shit,” he said. “That’s a good one.” And with that he spat a full tablespoon of tobacco juice onto what was left of the stranger’s white suit, and closed the door behind him.
The bird.
In the darkened streets she made her rounds. The night was cool, the streets quiet. But it was not the heat and certainly not the noise that kept the woman awake. She could neither hear nor speak, and some nights she also could not sleep. Some nights, and some days too, swarms of sharp-winged flies invaded her skull, entering through her ears and nose and through the corners of her mouth and circling madly in the small black-orange room between her forehead and the rear wall of her cranium. The only thing to do was walk, so she gathered her skirts about her and climbed the embankment into the streets.
The night felt safer than the day. Darkness, the woman knew, has its privileges. Blindness too, and even deafness. At night there were no cars to hit her on the avenues, no looming trucks, no people to scold her for one or another imagined sin. There were fewer men to pull her into alleys, no bored policemen choosing their targets from behind mirrored shades, no sneakered women with clipboards and government name tags, lips pursed in pity but eyes dead to care. She had no fear of rats and the dogs left her alone.
She crouched to pass through a hole in the fence and cross from the concrete lip of the embankment through the tangled weeds to the lots between the warehouses. She walked down the middle of the potholed street. Searching the walls for cameras, she saw none. Steel shutters had been pulled closed over the loading bays. Even the high windows of the warehouses had been painted black or gray. At night the buildings had no eyes. Their mouths were sewn shut. This was a comfort to her — to pass unseen, unspoken to — and also, of course, a torment. Invisibility has its costs. If no one saw her, she asked herself, was she even there?
But the woman was not entirely alone. It hardly counts as company, but she soon came across a man. She almost stumbled over him where he lay curled on the ground beside a dumpster. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. In lieu of a blanket, he wore a lumpy army-surplus jacket. He wheezed in short, troubled breaths, hugging an empty bottle like an infant to his breast. She tiptoed around him — wary, keeping her feet and ankles at least an arm’s length from his sleep-twitching hands — and lifted the corner of the dumpster’s lid. It was empty save a cardboard box, which was also empty, so she rushed away and did not slow until she had put a block between them. Only once she had gazed back and seen the shadow of him there unmoving, like a lump in the pitted asphalt, did she allow herself to pause and pull a stone from her shoe.
A block away, she stopped again and watched the insects circling in the inverted funnels of yellow light that hung down from the streetlamps to her right and to her left. She tried to count them but soon gave up. There were too many and they flickered about too quickly. Some of them were moths. All of them spiraled expectantly upward, abandoning for this one bright chance at transcendence all the screaming demands of sustenance and procreation. Who can blame them? A bat flitted from lamp to lamp and picked them off.
She clanked open the lids of the dumpsters in the alley beside a produce warehouse and found a full crate of pears wedged among the bulbous trash bags. The fruits were too ripe and too bruised to sell, but not to eat. She heaved out the crate and laid it in the shadows at the edge of the alley where she could find it again on her way back. She took one pear with her, biting through its browning flesh. The juice ran down her chin and onto her chest through the open collars of her shirts. She smiled at its sweetness, chewing as she walked.
The woman passed a sprawling cinderblock building indistinguishable from the rest but which she knew to be a distribution hub for plastic toys, a sort of vast nursery and holding pen for injection-molded infants, ponies, soldiers and bears. She ducked to dodge a swiveling camera, climbed a fence and tried the dumpsters. Two were locked, one was empty and a fourth was filled only with pink plastic shavings, shredded paper and the crusted styrofoam remains of workers’ meals — no dolls or parts of dolls.
Around the corner, on the other side of the now-sleepy highway, behind the wholesale flower mart, she found a mound of discarded bouquets of the most extraordinary blossoms: petals like meteors, like velvet curtains, like bayonets; pistils like furred stag’s legs, like spotted towers, stigmata that looked soft and wide enough to sleep on. Their stems had broken, so the florists deemed them ruined. She could carry at least two bouquets, she figured, stacked atop the pears. As she knelt to choose among them, she saw to her surprise that one of the flowers was twitching. It was a huge, drooping, pudendal bloom, red, yellow and black and pulsing furiously as if wired to a miniature engine. She lifted it, and the flower fell still. On the pavement beneath, she found a tiny bird. It was a hummingbird, no bigger than her thumb. One of its wings lay outstretched beneath it like another strange petal. Its other wing beat with such speed that she could barely see it. For all its effort, the bird could not fly.
She scooped the bird up with her fingers and folded its broken wing against its tiny, humming body. It weighed less than the flower that had covered it. In her hand, the hummingbird was still. The wing ceased its fluttering. Its shiny, black, pinprick of an eye did not express pain or panic or anything at all. But even in the dull, sepia light of the streetlamp, the bird’s plumage shimmered from green to red to gold and seemed to be all of those colors at once. She stroked its head with the pad of her index finger and placed it gently in the breast pocket of her outermost shirt. She picked two bouquets of flowers and went back to fetch the fruit.
Walking home, she stopped every few paces, set down her load and lifted the bird from her pocket. Its heart whirred like a turbine in her palm.
He dials an old friend.
The stranger limped down the highway in the dark. After a few miles of rutted asphalt he came across a gas station. It was closed and deserted but for the mosquitoes that circled in the flickering light above the pumps. He fed a pocket
ful of nickels into the pay phone in the corner of the parking lot, beside the ice machine. He let it ring fourteen times before he hung up. The nickels clanged down again and bounced rolling to the blacktop. He sat on the ground among them and leaned his back against the post on which the phone was hung. Above the phone, a camera blinked red. He slept for half an hour without snoring, his face untroubled by dreams. Then he tried again, depositing nickel after nickel into the coin slot until at last the phone began to ring. Fourteen more rings passed, then fourteen more. At last a hoarse voice answered. He asked for Gabriel.
“He’s asleep.”
“So wake him.” He heard silence, then a click. He dug around for more nickels, dialed again.
“What,” the hoarse voice growled.
“Gabriel,” he said. “Wake him. I’ll make it worth your while.”
There was a pause. “And who the fuck are you?”
“Take a chance. Believe me. Good will come your way. Do this one thing for me.”
“He gets up early, around six.” Again, a click, then a dial tone. The stranger crouched on the asphalt again, and slept beneath the phone until the sun rose. This time he slept uneasily, his body shaking, his fists clenched, shadows of dreams chasing themselves across his face.
As soon as he woke he called again. The desk clerk made him wait while he sent up to Gabriel’s room, and he had to feed the phone once more with coins. At last Gabriel picked up. “Gabriel,” he said. “It’s me.”
Gabriel said nothing for a long while. “Why are you calling me?” he finally said.
“I need a favor, Gabriel.”
“Try someone else. I’m all out.”
“Just one last time. For old time’s sake.”
“Forget it.”
“Thank you, Gabriel. I really mean that. I’ll be there tomorrow. I won’t forget this.”
“I said forget it,” Gabriel said. “It’s over.” He hung up. The stranger hung up too, smiled to himself, and started off down the road.
The problem with things.
Things were in crisis. The sun still shone. Daily it rose. Daily it set. The moon worked its circuit and also the stars. If you squinted your eyes, everything seemed all right. But things did not fit themselves. Though they continued to function as if nothing had changed. That was the worst of it. The bagman did not know how else to put it except that things no longer appeared to be contained by their own outlines. Ordinary things. Sidewalks, cars, what have you. They seemed too tight, too baggy, ill-meshed to one another, all bunched up. They sat wrong with themselves. The textures seemed false, the smells manufactured. The colors were off. Things appeared to mock themselves. Every single thing seemed an imperfect parody of its own essence.
It had not always been so. The bagman had not always been a bagman. That much he was able to acknowledge. He’d had a name once, though he no longer cared to recollect it. He had been a citizen of the most ordinary sort, an unquestioning believer in the thingness of things, in their coherence and singularity. He had shopped in shopping malls, gone to bed in a bedroom, dined, at times, in diners. He had worn ordinary clothes and smelled of ordinary soap. Pressed khakis. V-neck sweaters. Dove. Prell. But his life had been cleaved by an incident that he was only willing to let himself think of — and then cautiously, as if handling a bare wire that might be live, with steel pliers and wet hands — as The Incident. And the only thing that you or I will get to know about The Incident is that it happened, that it was done. Those two words contained for the bagman all the uncontainable enormity of the past tense. He used them to construct a shade with which to cover from view the actual event and the chain of events that followed it — the infinite, incomprehensible connections between them, the mute stupidity of time — a shade that served to hide all but the fuzziest contours of the bagman’s pre-bag life. What had been, the bagman knew, no longer was. The Incident, like the astral phenomenon inaccurately called a black hole, sucked all he knew inside it and stranded him alone in the world, hollow and hungry, a bearded, malodorous, birth-defected newborn, lost and already slightly broken. Around the edges of that hole that was not a hole, the bagman felt a deep, thirsting anxiety, and something akin to guilt.
In better moods, he tried to laugh. He rarely drank, but when he did he found it easier. And by it, I mean, well, all of it. He could pretend it was a joke and that he was in on the joke. Pick up a pint of Karlov from the Korean man behind the plexiglass cage at the corner store, sip on a park bench, scratch his big, grey belly and toast the world, wink wink. Toast the squirrels and the ants and the cameras hidden in the trees and the weeds that grew in the cracks in the cement, widening the cracks, turning cement to sand, to dust. Toast the clouds and the wind and the birds that swam squawking from tree branch to tree branch, and the squawks that lingered in the pulsing space between the branches. Raise the bottle to the smell of jasmine in the springtime, the first-rain smell of fall, the smell of urine all year long. Toast the clicking of heels on the sidewalk, the hum of passing cars outside the park, the muttering and whispering of the men and women who had sat here yesterday and all the days before that, a child’s voice somewhere behind him, the child’s ball as it escaped the child’s hands and bounced away down the concrete path
But the joviality was hard to sustain. There were too many things. They stared him down. Vodka can only get you so far. Invariably, it would cause him to fall asleep, a not so unpleasant outcome if it were not that he always eventually woke, and usually at some middle level of despair. Not quite the bottom floor — to which he felt no desire to return — but still much too near the basement. Mouth dry, head throbbing with questions: even if it was a joke, whose joke was it? More important, on whom? And joke or calamity, if a thing was no longer itself, if its skin had been somehow stretched or shrunk and altered, what was it? What was anything in this mad, sick blur? Could he rest his weight on this earth and know that it would bear him?
These questions, of course, do not pertain solely to the bagman. I don’t mind admitting that they’re mine as well — how else could I have known to write them, to attribute them to him? But the bagman, limited as he was by the four rounded corners of his skull, had no way of knowing this and tried on occasion to check in with others, to determine if he was alone in his concerns. He was not successful. Other people, he found, did not wish to speak with him. Approached, they scurried from him with mouths clamped shut. As if he were something contagious. (His code of dress, it should be said, did not conform to prevailing social norms. Nor, perhaps more crucially, did his approach to hygiene.) And even if people had stopped to listen, had opened themselves to him fully, the truth was that words fought him with even greater avidity than stone-mute things. They flitted between his ears like drunken moths, turning to vapor before he could force them through his mouth. If it cost him a near-Herculean effort to construct and impart the simplest declarative proposition, what hope could he have to convey such vast and metaphysical quandaries?
Nonetheless, he gathered evidence. He hoped for a tribunal, a chance to make his case. Before whom, he wasn’t sure. Nor against whom. He planned to collect one of everything. That was his original intent. To make a comprehensive case. To be able to display at least one instance of every single thing, like Noah if Noah had herded all the beasts in the world up the gangplank and onto the ark for purposes of prosecution rather than preservation. As evidence. He was limited by finances, of which he had none. This restricted him to things found abandoned or which he could handily nick. And to things small enough to carry, as he had no secure abode of his own in which to store them.
Isn’t this counterintuitive? Wouldn’t he be moved to flee the things that menaced him, and not to hug them to him? Well it’s hard to get away from things. Even in sleep, even in stupor, there they are, stubborn as your shadow. And the bagman, as you shall see, was a man of considerable courage. He dodged the past (if dodge is the right word for his careful self-immurement), but he flinched at nothing else. He ran bravely
forward, if never back. He handled each of the objects he harvested as an exterminator treats a rat he’s caught alive, with a thick admixture of revulsion, curiosity, and affection bred by bondage to a task.
He laid up his gleanings in big plastic trash bags and carried them with him everywhere. He filled one bag and then another. Three he could carry, but for more than that he needed a cart. Something existed in the makeup of police officers, he had learned, some broken neural switch, frayed fascicles perhaps, or a congenitally torn meninx: they did not like to see a man push a cart. Their reactions were unpredictable and tended toward extremes. It didn’t matter. He quickly found that there was insufficient regularity even among things of any given category — socks, for instance, or rubber bands — to justify his original ambition. He could argue his case just as effectively if his body of evidence consisted entirely of rubber bands, every rubber band being distinct from every other rubber band and all of them, every single one, failing in some inchoate but nonetheless essential manner to actually be a rubber band. So he culled his collection and left the cart in an alley.
To save his back the trouble of hauling inessential weight, he confined himself to objects he deemed especially illustrative of the general crisis. These objects were not necessarily deformed or damaged in any describable fashion, though many were. Some were new and spotless exemplars of their type, still shrink-wrapped even, and it was as such that he chose them, if only to prove that, as an uncle had told him many forgotten years before, you can’t spitshine a turd.
It did occur to him with nagging persistence that the root of the problem might lie closer to home, that the collected artifacts of creation were as they’d always been, but he had somehow slipped his boundaries. It could be, he realized, a problem of perception, though his eyes, at least, were fine. He decided not to pursue that possibility. It led him with excruciating inevitability to the high and crenellated parapets encircling The Incident, and to a painful question: if he could muster no faith in the world or in any of the myriad things that comprise it, what right had he to walk among them?
Ether Page 2
